Purchase
This Book Will Save Your Life
A. M. Homes
From the author of Music for Torching—an uplifting and apocalyptic tale set in Los Angeles about one man’s efforts to bring himself back to life
Viking
April 2006
384 pages
ISBN: 0670034932
Hardcover
Add to Wish List
Fiction
Since her debut in 1989, A. M. Homes has been among the
boldest and most original voices of her generation,
acclaimed for the psychological accuracy and unnerving
emotional intensity of her storytelling. Her keen ability to
explore how extraordinary the ordinary can be is at the
heart of her touching and funny new novel, her first in six
years. Richard Novak is a modern-day Everyman, a middle-aged
divorcé trading stocks out of his home. He has done such a
good job getting his life under control that he needs no
one—except his trainer, nutritionist, and housekeeper. He is
functionally dead and doesn’t even notice until two
incidents—an attack of intense pain that lands him in the
emergency room, and the discovery of an expanding sinkhole
outside his house—conspire to hurl him back into the world.
On his way home from the hospital, Richard forms the first
of many new relationships: He meets Anhil, the doughnut shop
owner, an immigrant who dreams big. He finds a weeping
housewife in the produce section of the supermarket, helps
save a horse that has fallen into the sinkhole, daringly
rescues a woman from the trunk of her kidnapper’s car, and,
after the sinkhole claims his house and he has to relocate
to a Malibu rental, he befriends a reluctant counterculture
icon. In the end, Richard is also brought back in closer
touch with his family—his aging parents, his brilliant
brother, the beloved ex-wife whom he still desires, and
finally, before the story’s breathtaking finale, with his
estranged son Ben. The promised land of Los Angeles—a surreal city of
earthquakes, wildfires, mudslides, and feral Chihuahuas—is
also very much a character in This Book Will Save Your Life.
A vivid, revealing novel about compassion, transformation,
and what can happen if you are willing to lose yourself and
open up to the world around you, it should significantly
broaden Homes’s already substantial audience.
Comments
No comments posted.
Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!
| 
© 2003-2024 off-the-edge.net
all rights reserved Privacy Policy